Project Description This research project was jump-started through fellowships at the Smithsonian and with the Carnegie Council in 2004-2005. It grew from opportunities in each case to interact with cultural workers and with the professional human rights community, in ways focused on the diversifying intersections of “culture” with the “rights” concept, in international law [...]

Project Description: Taking as its departure point my own active involvement in ongoing professional disciplinary discussions about the role of anthropology in the work of military, security and intelligence organizations during the post-“Petraeus doctrine” era of culture-centric counterinsurgency, this work has evolved into a comparative research project with a focus on military and security [...]

Project Description: Long-term ethnographic research in Bolivia, conducted regularly since 1991, has been invested in understanding what it means to be “indigenous” in this majority indigenous country, in particular, in a region historically characterized by extensive cultural mixture (mestizaje) and among people often assumed to be “non-indigenous.” This research gives close attention to the [...]

Project Description My work combines research with advocacy with policy engagement while aspiring to move beyond the limits of academic exchange. Whether working closely with indigenous movement activists in Bolivia or with the international human rights community, these are community-based collaborative projects that are also essentially dialogic. Intended as a critical catalyst to open space [...]

Most often associated with Alec Ross’s stint at the State Department as Senior Advisor for Innovation, diplomacy’s rush to better leverage the advantages of social media and mobile technologies by investing in ediplomacy and PD 2.0 is no secret. On his first day as new Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs last February, Richard Stengel made his position clear: social media are “transformational tools” and the State Department needs to move toward a “digital-first strategy.” Ambassadors now tweet regularly. Out of a desire to “make foreign policy less foreign,” even Secretary of State John Kerry tweets. And the State Department is now running what a 2012 Brookings report described as a “global media empire.”

But if digital diplomats extoll the reach and connectivity offered by social media platforms, less attention is given to what they think these advantages mean in practice, that is, the world view of digital diplomacy. A late April summit in D.C. on the “Future of Diplomacy,” hosted by the Diplomatic Courier and the United Nations Foundation, was an opportunity to contemplate how diplomacy and technology meaningfully intersect. The summit offered the chance to hear the views of digital diplomats and, as Craig Hayden has encouraged, to assess prevailing attitudes and assumptions among public diplomacy practitioners about the uses, value, and efficacy of social media platforms for their work.

The event’s main conclusion appeared to be that, despite enthusiasm for social media, diplomacy “will always be built on personal relationships and face-to-face interactions.” This was odd, given who was convened for the event. Partners included +SocialGood, a “global community of innovators” seeking to harness “the power of technology and new media to make the world a better place,” and the Digital Diplomacy Coalition, a group created to share “ideas and best practices to leverage digital technologies.” One of two co-sponsors was RedTouchMedia, a company that has developed an anonymous distribution platform for digital content delivery. Panelists included staffers responsible for digital diplomacy for the embassies of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Italy, as well as the director of Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Government, and a curator from Frequency540, a strategic communications agency dedicated to digital analytics. The vibe throughout was one of enthusiasm for diplomacy’s digital present and increasingly digital future. So why the old-school conclusion?

Clues were sprinkled throughout panelists’ comments. Israel’s embassy staffer described social media platforms as “non-hierarchical” places where people can be “open and spontaneous.” Frequency540’s representative characterized social media-enabled relationships as “informal.” He referenced the ubiquitous selfie as an example of the “humanization” effect of social media, where people expect more direct access to opinion-makers. Panelists identified social media platforms with the opportunity for “authentic storytelling.” The Microsoft representative noted how these platforms enable more “substantive conversations,” which show the human side of diplomacy’s work. Social media users expect “real, approachable, people,” it was explained, and so, neither “surrogates” nor “automated agents” pass muster. These “won’t be authentic.”

In other words, public diplomacy professionals registered enthusiasm for social media’s evident promise of greater authenticity of self-presentation as a basis for diplomatic communication. In this post-Snowden era of the leak, a comparable note is sounded with calls for greater “transparency” in U.S. government use of Internet-based technologies and information – especially given revelations of massive data-mining and the new likelihood that any “gap between its actions and words” will eventually be exposed. In April panelists similarly celebrated social media tools as a means to close “the gap between our values and how we carry them out.” The parallel is between a Snowden-type exposure of hypocrisy and the perception of inauthentic communication. Throughout the summit social media was associated with authenticity, in turn, equated with the congruence of values with words with deeds.

In this context the summit’s conclusion about face-to-face interactions as an enduring cornerstone of public diplomacy becomes better understood. However, at a moment of attempted stealth cuts to the Fulbright program, the uncritical celebration of social media hipness, embraced by practitioners as an attractive opportunity for more direct communication with public diplomacy’s critical subject populations, is puzzling. The breezy elision of social media with greater self-authenticity, in particular, advances a deeply flawed account of social media’s potential for diplomacy.

Left unconsidered were the ways that social networking sites, or the next trending social app, are in no way direct forms of communication but instead technologically mediated platforms with parameters that significantly determine the possibilities for social interaction and the performative choices for self-construction. The selfie is firstly an artifact of front-facing cellphone cameras, and increasingly “carefully curated, filtered, posed, and polished,” in the words of one commentator, a “manufactured self” newly popularized by the enthusiasm for snapchatting and related trends. Social media-driven relationships are, in other words, very far from face-to-face and any appreciation of authenticity on these platforms cannot be considered apart from their particular presentational possibilities.

And social media can be manipulated in non-transparent ways. Examples abound. A recently uncovered cyber-espionage campaign by Iranian hackers included creating more than a dozen “fake personas” on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and elsewhere, as well as fake online news services, to build online relationships with targets for spear-phishing messages. One summit panelist described his embassy’s creation of a fake LinkedIn page for Iran’s president Rouhani which was then retweeted widely with the intent to “shift the conversation” away from Rouhani’s moderate credentials. Commentators have noted the Twitter war over Ukraine, with its incomplete, one-sided, distorting, and often false information sharing.

Meanwhile, the State Department’s Digital Outreach Team does not simply debate America’s critics on Twitter, but also hijacks hashtags and spoofs propaganda videos. Lines between hacking, trolling, and debating get fuzzy. Then there was the USAID-funded “Cuban Twitter,” or ZunZuneo, a secret program using cell phone text messaging to create a critical mass of subscribers – never aware of the U.S.’s role – intended as a direct line to regular Cubans in order to eventually introduce controversial political content. Finally, we witnessed the Stephen Colbert fake Twitter controversy, where satire led to “real” if misinformed online protest.

These are all examples of non-transparent social media-enabled fakery, where words and deeds veer in different directions, operators use “self-presentation” deceptively, and distinctions between diplomacy and espionage become taxed. Social media effectively amplifies propagandistic reportage of contentious events and conceals ulterior motives because there is typically little context accompanying content, but also because the particular source behind a given cybercampaign is not immediately identifiable. Social media is aptly described as a dimension of what Jean Baudrillard – an astute observer of popular culture – called “hyperreality,” his term for an increasing inability to distinguish reality from simulations of it. Social media interactions amplify the effects of hyperreality, not the other way around.

In the post-Snowden era, social media denizens are well aware that their personal data are collected by governments and corporations for uses other than their own. By ignoring these regular manipulations of the technological backstage, the naive authenticity expressed by digital diplomats seems disingenuous. Why take it seriously? It distracts attention from the self-consciously made-up and manipulated: hallmarks of social media’s technologically-enabled platforms for “interested” communication and the recruitment of followers. We are better off, as the anthropologist Daniel Miller has put it, remaining attentive to the ways in which social media “authenticity is created out of fakery.”

An earlier version of this post appeared on USC’s CPD blog site: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/inauthenticity-and-tweet-tweet-digital-diplomacy.

Frameworks for cultural diplomacy in the U.S. are often too narrow and too broad. On the one hand, self-identified practitioners of cultural diplomacy – within and outside government – tend to identify, if somewhat generically, specific exportable forms of expressive culture (think: music, theater, literature, dance, murals, or film). Particularly for government-sponsored cultural diplomacy programming, these expressive forms are often represented by celebrity practitioners of the art in question, who serve as cultural ambassadors in organized exchanges, international tours, or one-off happenings. Hence, Satchmo, Dave Brubeck, Roy Lichtenstein, Yo-Yo Ma, Beyoncé, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the New York Philharmonic, Martha Graham, Ozomatli, Steven Spielberg, Jonathan Franzen, and many others. As with the Fulbright and comparable programs, we have cultural diplomacy as direct and intimate encounters among citizens of different nationalities.

On the other hand, we continue to discuss cultural diplomacy in much more encompassing geopolitical terms, as soft power, aided and abetted by the ongoing realities of cultural globalization. In this mode we tend to assume, often not in specifically grounded ways, the global circulation of cultural content as goods and services and with a growing proportion of content taking digital form. Hence, Hollywood, Nashville, Silicon Valley, network T.V., fast food, video gaming, and New York University. For better or worse, depending upon the commentator, the U.S. is generally credited with a tremendous – if gradually shrinking – advantage, given the comparatively unparalleled volume of cultural content it produces and distributes for global consumption, particularly in the audiovisual sector. In this case we have cultural diplomacy as global, if nationalized, consumer experience.

There is a vast scalar difference between these two applications of culture for diplomacy. The first is often described as people-to-people diplomacy, designed and implemented to interact with a relatively small and well-defined set of target audiences. The second engages amorphously with publics variously defined and largely beyond any dedicated program to shape specific outcomes, though often included as one factor in nation branding. But just as it designs and promotes programs of cultural exchange, the U.S. government will move to defend its perceived soft power advantages, if threatened. This was the case several years back when U.S. trade representatives unsuccessfully sought to check a push through UNESCO to limit the presence of American cultural goods and services in other national markets, in the form of the 2005 Cultural Diversity Convention.

If U.S. government-sponsored cultural diplomacy and the soft power-type circulation of culture operate on different scales, discussion of their significance by U.S. public diplomacy practitioners and commentators nevertheless exhibits a common feature: an orientation toward assessment of the effects of U.S. culture upon other people, countries, or global publics. What happens, goes the question, when expressive culture performed, produced, or organized for export and distribution by U.S. citizens, the government, civil society, corporations, or industries, circulates outside of the U.S. for consumption by non-Americans? A connected, often taken-for-granted, question is: In what ways does such cultural diplomacy messaging or outreach benefit the U.S. or advance national interests?

I’ve put this simplistically to highlight again a point I’ve made before: the extent to which discussions of the significance of cultural diplomacy in the U.S. continue to maintain a lopsided view of communication and exchange, paying almost exclusive attention to the possible ways expressive culture produced in the U.S. is delivered, consumed, and influences non-Americans. But such an orientation is, at best, only half of the equation, and a suspect half at that, given the massive volume of global cultural flows constantly moving across porous national boundaries. Even so, a more rounded account of the effects of cultural diplomacy would give more attention to the ways diverse forms of expressive culture not originating in the U.S. are consumed in the U.S. and shape this country’s cultural dialogue with the world.

Or not, as the case may be. Only three percent of everything published in the U.S. each year is translated from another language. And the majority of that vanishingly small total is technical manuals. As a Nobel committee member noted, Americans “don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” The U.S. literary scene of authors, journalists, publishers, and readers is insular and isolated. Contemporary global literature is largely absent in the lives of Americans. As journalist Anna Clark has recently made the case, this alarming literary insularity amounts to a “roadblock to global discourse.” This lack of access to the rest of the world’s published creative output decreases the likelihood of Americans sharing overlapping histories and conversations with readers elsewhere. It becomes harder to imagine other cultural worlds or construct common goals.

We are unnecessarily limiting our imaginative lives. As Clark describes, the reasons for this are several. The U.S. publishing industry actively discourages literary translation. It marginalizes the translator, for which there are few incentives or financial rewards. American universities similarly devalue the work of translation as not sufficiently “original,” and so not helpful toward tenure. As such, translators often publish under pen names. Universities are, too, cutting back on foreign language education. Beyond a few small independent presses, books in translation remain on the industry’s fringe. Large publishing houses resist publishing them. When published they are also often subsidized by foreign governments. Writers from poorer countries that cannot afford to subsidize their authors are left out of the literary translation market altogether, no matter how outstanding.

This is only incidentally a rant about the blinkered U.S. publishing industry. Here I want instead to draw some conclusions for cultural diplomacy. To repeat: our cultural diplomacy frameworks are too narrow and too broad. With few exceptions, discussions of soft power lack context or grounding in any specific public or set of social relations. We assume the mysterious workings of cultural globalization to work in our favor. People-to-people exchange is restricted to particular partners, events, or programs, instead of broader considerations of the circulation of culture through publics. And regardless of scale, we assume culture to be an instrument to persuade others rather than a dialogic beachhead. Meanwhile, people in the U.S. are most likely unaware that they have been largely shut out from, in this case, a global print-based conversation.

But the peculiarities of the U.S. publishing industry remind us that so-called global cultural flows do not simply circulate. They flow disjunctively: directed, shaped and sometimes inhibited by what we might call mediating structures of interlocution, composed of combinations of: industry practice, investment, legal frameworks, collaborative networks, business models, consumer preferences, and value chains, which, taken together, make up particular corners of the global creative economy, like publishing. And as new social cataloguing web applications like Library Thing suggest, these structures are not at all static, but can enable new alignments among authors, readers, translators, libraries, and publishers.

If the goal of cultural diplomacy is to facilitate constructive conversation, it becomes necessary to attend to the mediating structures that in effect patrol the shape of national and global cultural traffic. The U.S. publishing industry composes only one such point of mediation. These mediating structures are where national industries concretely intersect with the global economy, found in between often amorphous publics referenced by soft power and particular partners of cultural exchange. And yet, they significantly determine the possible shapes of the cultural conversations we are, and are not, able to have.

This post first appeared on USC’s CPD blog site: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/cultural_diplomacy_of_and_by_the_book/

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) – established in 2006 in the spirit of the Pentagon’s DARPA to sponsor research for groundbreaking technologies to support an “overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries” – is a little-known US agency that social and behavioral scientists (especially sociocultural anthropologists) should pay more attention to. This is because IARPA is notably social scientific in orientation and has been developing concepts in specific ways for use by the intelligence community (IC) that US anthropology in particular is significantly historically responsible for introducing to the social sciences, if in different ways, most obviously: culture, its coherence and the extent of cultural consensus, its relationship to society and to human agency.

At its inception IARPA was tasked with developing better ways, in USA Today-speak, to “help analysts measure cultural habits of another society.” And its portfolio continues to sponsor research intended to develop big data-type tools to process the linguistic and cultural information of countries, societies and communities of interest to US espionage. While there are anthropologists who work along the frontier between their discipline and the rapidly emerging computational social sciences, it is unlikely that many anthropologists would approach cultural analysis in the terms currently pursued by IARPA. The agency’s formulations of cultural problems likely strike most social scientists as well outside of, or as at odds with, the standard or prevailing disciplinary usages of this concept, including the concept’s basic significance and what legitimately can be done with it. But, it is often the case – and unfortunately so – that there is scant traffic of any kind between academic anthropology and the IC, even when there are clearly things to talk about, like the culture concept.

A Public Anthropology of the IC?

In the era of Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, journalists have increasingly sought to shine a light on “top secret America,” to borrow Dana Priest’s phrase. And public debate has in large part focused on the new circumstances of privacy (or the lack thereof), clandestine data collection, and the ethics of new largely internet-based and social media-derived means used by intelligence agencies to amass colossal troves of information while mining people’s online signatures. Much less often considered, if at all, is whether the sociological or anthropological theory – the tissue of ideas and concepts underwriting these programs – actually makes any sense.

Instead, the vast majority of attention is given to extolling and further exploring the possibilities for data collection opened up by new computational and social media technologies. Too often, wide-ranging and critically grounded academic discussion and debate has played virtually no part in how these programs are conceived and implemented. A lack of more substantive dialogue about the social science informing IARPA’s programs, and the possibility of skewed or flawed results built upon misguided or unexamined assumptions, is a serious problem with the potential to negatively and mischievously – but perhaps not altogether obviously – influence intelligence priorities in the US, and if indirectly, the country’s foreign policy footprint.

IARPA’s several culture-focused programs point to the need for more critical discussion among social scientists about IARPA-style social science and related priorities of security and intelligence agencies, a discussion which could at once address and more trenchantly appraise the particular assumptions (and social scientific world view) underwriting such projects, their limits, and the ways that questionable or debatable concepts and practices with traction in the social science of the securityscape are potentially relevant, defensible, or ill-conceived. This is a conversation that should also include the IC itself. But this is not a conversation that social scientists outside the IC either are regularly aware of, want, or perhaps even know how to have, with a few exceptions.

When academic social scientists do address the social science of the securityscape, the prevailing approach is to take issue with the politics and ethics of social scientific involvement with the present version of the military industrial complex, advanced from a position well outside this work and often at a considerable distance from the specific details – and many of the implications – of it. But we also need more grounded and zoomed-in discussion about the epistemologies, research designs, data, analysis, and conclusions drawn by this work, and associated implications, which take account of the ways this realm of social scientific ideas and concepts also drives IC priorities and outcomes in ways sometimes constructive but perhaps at least as often, problematic. If such discussions sometimes do take place, they need to be broader, deeper, more inclusive, and sustained.

A program to measure cultural habits suggests a quantitative approach to a hermeneutical problem, which, at the very least, takes for granted a very different conception of culture as a source of insight than the various ways that anthropologists usually engage with this concept. These differences are not trivial. “Culture” is a concept from which US anthropology notably retreated in the 1990s and which the discipline has continued to qualify in multiple ways, while for the IC interest in “socio-cultural factors” – often as cultural intelligence and as enlisted in exercises of prediction – has been notable since the mid-2000s, if to various ends. The reasons why the IC and academic anthropology appear headed in opposite directions vis-à-vis the culture concept would certainly be a timely discussion.

Metaphor for the IC

Several of IARPA’s programs have attracted at least some journalistic attention of late as well, such as 2011’s Open Source Indicators program. But here I consider instead IARPA’s Metaphor Program, also launched in 2011, because it is a particularly revealing example of the recent technologically-enhanced version of the cultural turn by the US intelligence community. Most simply, a “metaphor” is a linguistic relationship of similarity, where one experiential domain (the target) is understood by way of reference to another (the source). Astronomer Fred Hoyle coining the term “big bang” to refer to one theory for the origin of the universe is a case in point. IARPA’s program aspires to provide decision-makers with a more systematic understanding of the “shared concepts and worldviews of members of other cultures” by compiling a given culture’s metaphors and making these available to intelligence analysts.

My questions about this objective are several, if connected: As part of a larger IC project for culture, what does “metaphor” currently mean to the US intelligence community? And, given what “metaphor” means for the IC, how does this understanding influence the ways the IC might conceptualize specific cultures or foreign publics of interest? And what, in turn, might this mean for the footprint of the US intelligence community, as it offers policy decision-makers a particular account of global geopolitics, at least in part informed – if indirectly and in ways most likely invisible to any given decision-maker – by programs like this one?

IARPA’s solicitation for its Metaphor Program promotes the goal of a better understanding of “the tacit backdrop against which members of a culture interact and behave,” or the patterned “cultural norms” which compose the “worldviews of particular groups or individuals.” And metaphors are the program’s choice because they are both “pervasive in everyday language” and, IARPA assumes, metaphors “shape how people think about complex topics.” More importantly, IARPA understands metaphors to “reduce the complexity of meaning” because their usage is patterned.

As the program’s manager, Heather McCallum-Bayliss, observed, “Culture is a set of values, attitudes, knowledge and patterned behaviors shared by a group.” IARPA’s conception of metaphor is assumed to be a key to understand cultures, in large part because cultures, in turn, are understood – channeling the ghost of Ruth Benedict – as patterned and shared group behavior. Such a preference for disciplinarily obsolete but hyper-coherent conceptions of culture like Benedict’s in the broader military and security environment is far from unique. And a consistent preference for such starting points is telling about IARPA’s objectives and the computational steps it intends to take to achieve them.

IARPA is investing in research on metaphors because it is convinced such research has the potential to uncover the “inferred meanings,” “conventional understandings” and “underlying concepts that people share,” thus allowing the intelligence community to gain better analytic purchase on identified “cultures of interest,” but more importantly for the agency, on the “decision-making and perception of foreign actors.” To this end, IARPA’s approach to metaphor is largely derived from one influential story about metaphor most closely related to the species of cognitive linguistics associated with George Lakoff and colleagues. And Lakoff, it turns out, is not coincidentally, a member of a research team now working to develop a multilingual metaphor repository with IARPA funding from its Metaphor Program.

Lakoff’s Tristes Tropes

So, first we need to know a few things about the Lakovian approach to metaphor, since there are other contenders in the scholarly field of trope theory. If beginning with his influential Metaphors We Live By, co-authored with Mark Johnson in 1980, in recent years Lakoff has also established a reputation as a public intellectual of sorts, applying his metaphor-heavy analytic hand to the US political landscape. In his most recent incarnation, Lakoff has used his approach to metaphor to support the progressive cause, and has often presented his work in the form of guides, handbooks and toolkits instead of as research. But, while Lakoff’s heart might lie with progressives, his conception of metaphor is deeply conservative, as I make the case below. And this has direct consequences for IARPA’s program, taking for granted as it does the Lakovian world view on metaphor.

Here’s Lakoff’s take on metaphor, in a nutshell. As he explains, conceptual metaphors – which typically employ a more abstract concept (e. g. politics) as a target and a more concrete topic (e. g. family) as a source – shape the ways we think and act, and underwrite a system of related metaphorical expressions that appear more directly on the surface of our language use, which Lakoff calls linguistic metaphors. If much more can be said about this, here’s the rub so far as IARPA is concerned: conceptual metaphors are the key for understanding how speakers – typically, members of the same “culture” – systematically map relationships between conceptual domains. Mapping in the Lakovian mode refers to the patterned set of correspondences that exist between source and target domains.

While there is good reason to assume that the map is not the same as the territory, one imagines that IARPA sees potential in such a mapping exercise because maps promise empirical predictability. Another probable attraction is that Lakoff’s work on metaphor has, in recent years, become increasingly slanted toward neuroscience. He now describes “neural metaphorical mappings,” where metaphors are “fixed in the brain” along “pathways ready for metaphor circuitry.” Lakoff’s marrying of cognitive linguistics to neuroscience has transformed a woolly term from the humanities – metaphor – into a building block for a new “neural theory of metaphor,” now presented as a scientific tropology, in ways conversant with a growing obsession across US military and security agencies with the potential of neuroscience.

Machines Learning Metaphors

IARPA’s Metaphor Program is, essentially, about combining emerging techniques and technologies in computational modeling with cognitive linguistic theories of metaphor like Lakoff’s. At the Proposer’s Day brief explaining its new metaphor program, IARPA described linguistic metaphors as “realizations of the underlying pattern or systematic association of abstract concepts” – a set of relationships IARPA assumes to be “defined by mapping principles.” IARPA would like to be able to data-mine online textual data on a large scale, as a “rich source for identifying cultural beliefs” about key societies of interest, and to develop new automated techniques to identify, map and then analyze the metaphorical language of entirely online native-language text. (I won’t take up here why online text – as a particular technological platform, set of expressive conventions, and kind of performance – is unlikely to be unproblematically representative of peoples’ cultural beliefs.)

What is critical for evaluating this project is making sense of the conviction that the relationship, for example, between a given metaphoric target and source (e. g. understanding “government corruption” as a “disease”) is conventional and predictably mappable; or that the development of unsupervised machine learning of such metaphor mappings is possible; and that this will then enable computational metaphor identification and categorization, as part of a “metaphor repository,” a database IARPA would build and maintain for a given language; against which analysts will eventually and ideally be able to compare “real-life statements” to predict intentions of people who may represent a threat to the US. (The agency has identified American English, Farsi, Russian and Mexican Spanish as initial languages of interest.)

For IARPA’s program to be successful, a basically Lakovian approach to metaphor has to be uncritically accepted as correct: linguistic metaphors, assumed to be representative and available in large numbers at the surface of online native-language texts, will be massively mined; their relationships of source to target, it is further taken for granted, will be able to be systematically reliably mapped; these analogical maps, goes the reasoning, will enable identification of more fundamental conceptual metaphors among cultures of interest; and this will allow analysts to infer relevant cultural patterns informing the behavior of foreign nationals; and perhaps even to help predict their likely decision-making on complex topics.

Lakoff on metaphor, in other words, has to be coded into the computational tools to be used to build the repositories before any such metaphors are even collected. And Lakovian-type metaphorical maps seem to be the extent of IARPA’s data-mining game. This is to say, the theoretical starting point and technological requirements of IARPA’s metaphor program are largely determinative of what “metaphor” can mean in this case. But, since a scholarly consensus about metaphor eludes us, and since one could choose to emphasize other features of the diverse work of metaphor, IARPA’s choices tell us perhaps more about its own world view than about anyone else.

Metaphor through the Looking Glass

Each metaphorical mapping in a given repository, we are told, will be validated using metrics designed to confirm “native-speaker knowledge of the metaphorical relations.” Such an idea works only if each language were a reliably monoglot standard, underwritten by conventional metaphoric associations recognized as such and in the same ways by any typical and competent native speaker. And so, each metaphor is at once culturally-specific – let’s set aside that languages and cultures are not the same – but also culturally entirely conventional. Yet the idea of native competence is an increasingly suspect one among linguists.

IARPA’s choices have consequences. As with its consistently topographical conception of culture, where patterned cultures can be organically decomposed into constituent and mappable relations of figure to ground, IARPA seemingly relies almost entirely upon the conventionality of metaphor. A consequence of its peculiar approach to metaphor and to culture as a limiting condition upon how people think, is that IARPA’s working conception of its notional publics – the people it is trying computational to figure out – is seriously limiting. IARPA is all in with a conception of metaphor, we might say, as stuck in the mode of mechanical solidarity, giving its attention to what are otherwise called “dead metaphors,” which, it can be argued, are in fact no longer really metaphors at all.

IARPA’s metaphor repositories would be cross-cultural collections of metaphoricized commonsense, that is, composed of already recognized and accepted metaphoric relations, informing the predictable parameters – maybe more accurately, limiting frames – of analogic reasoning of members of a given culture. This has the potential to be perversely conservative, since IARPA would understand decision-makers as drawing upon an identifiable cultural aggregate of figurative relationships which are always already assumed to exist. Such a situation makes of prediction, paraphrasing Yogi Berra, an exercise in déjà vu all over again.

Given Lakoff’s fashionable redressing of his approach to metaphor in the terms of neuroscience, and the ways a technologically-enhanced culture concept is being engineered by IARPA’s Metaphor Program as a difference engine keyed to cultural consensus, the conventional, and metaphoric persistence, it would not be hard to imagine analysts, as beneficiaries of this data and when considering how the people they study make decisions, adopting an analytic shorthand to refer to the “Russian brain” or “Farsi brain,” in ways reminiscent of a Cold War era fascination with American, Russian or German “modal personality types.” For many anthropologists, research scenarios like these are troubling because they raise a Levy-Bruhl-like specter of “how natives think,” troubling because also aggressively “othering.” A cynic might go even farther to suggest programs such as this one are developing technologies for “enemy-making.”

Metaphor’s Multiple Futures?

Ignored or sidelined in IARPA’s efforts are competing conceptions of metaphor. Ricoeur, to pick one, emphasized the ways that metaphors creatively transform language by revealing new ways to conceive of a referent. Metaphors generate and regenerate meaning. Black explored the open-endedness of metaphors, which he understood as too unstable to function referentially, but as introducing previously unavailable meanings in the dynamic interplay of figure and ground. Davidson remained unconvinced that metaphors could function as propositional at all, insisting instead that it was a mistake to assume metaphors possess any particular or stable “meaning.” These several conceptions of metaphor point to the limits of consensus around the conventionality of metaphor and the ways that backward-looking exercises in mapping and archiving metaphoric relations can fail to anticipate the future.

To take a case in point: Genetics historically has been a field shot through with metaphors. Metaphors describing the work of genes are particularly ubiquitous, including: map, code, blueprint, and recipe, where DNA is understood to “write” the hereditary possibilities for our biological future. The biologist Richard Dawkins’s influential concept of the “selfish gene,” for example, promotes a gene-centric theory of evolution, where human beings are mere vehicles for successfully self-propagating individual genes, as the architects of natural selection. But the success of Dawkins’s selfish gene metaphor is beginning to obscure the changing meaning of “gene,” including a growing variety of technical usages.

Researchers now emphasize the idea of a “post-genomic” biology, where combinations of networks of less selfish and more managerial genes are also influential, where “writing” can be less important than “reading,” and the relation of heredity to the environment appears increasingly complex and dynamic. But there are as yet no convincing off-the-shelf metaphors to describe what we continue to learn about the behaviors of genes. In other words, even given the technical and highly shared vocabulary among evolutionary biologists, the shape-shifting of genes under scientific inspection eludes easy description. And whatever might follow the selfish gene story is still emergent as a set of metaphors that cannot be mapped without significant distortion.

If sharply divergent from IARPA’s starting point, what these several conceptions of metaphor share is an attention to the arguments at the center of culture, to the work of metaphor for social shape-shifting, and where identity is always in motion in relationship to – paraphrasing William James – the blooming buzz of experience. They attend to the translational and problem-solving work of metaphor, and to the ways metaphor might animate new inquiry. Conceived in such ways, metaphors do not so much express similarity but create new relations among “unlike things.”

Accounts like these foreground the properties of metaphor as extensive rather than conventional, and as emergent rather than underlying. Concerned as they are with the ways that metaphors, in the words of anthropologist James Fernandez, are strategic predications upon the inchoate – that is, predications upon frontiers of life and experience that elude our ready classification – these offer alternatives to the conception of metaphor currently being reinforced in the social science of national security. And these alternatives run devastatingly counter to any possibility for a predictive tropology of the near future.

Once again the debate about the arts and their relationship to the economy has been enjoined, this time in the UK. The terms are by now entirely familiar, and certainly loom in any discussion of the “value” of the arts in the US as well. This is particularly true for the US during recessions and periods of fiscal austerity. The NEA, as we know, is frequently obliged to make the case for the arts as a contributor to national economic growth. And it has been a virtual cottage industry among a succession of arts advocacy groups also desperate to do the same.

On one side of this broken record are found often highly instrumental and entrepreneurial accounts of the surplus value of investment in the arts: efforts to relate the creative sector to the overall performance of the economy, new models for understanding artistic creativity as a catalyst for economic innovation or cultural hubs as keys to urban renewal, and new tools to measure the economic contributions of the arts. These pitches appear most often designed for skeptical legislators and business leaders, city mayors and urban developers, who apparently feel the arts to be either an engine of capital or frivolous.

Inevitably, on the other side are artists and arts advocates whose first impulse is to defend the sanctity of “art for art’s sake” – still – often against the perceived cynical motives behind any effort to “quantify creativity” and undermine artistic integrity, which, in this, our post-“age of mechanical reproduction,” threatens to turn works of art into monochromatic commodities or economic goods. In passionate defense of their calling, artists tend to represent the value of art as universal, defended, alternatively, as an essentially spiritual, expressive, or creative exercise in what it means to be human. Given this, artists are often disinclined to justify or explore the various uses or value of art. Art just is.

If apparently a debate without end, the terms of this debate are also notably parochial. It is no coincidence that this public policy argument about the arts is especially characteristic of the US and the UK, and countries with similarly relatively scant public funding for the arts, significantly privatized arts economies, where artistic products are a major export, and most notably, where the public meaning of “art” is a legacy of Enlightenment-derived aesthetic and moral concepts.

In other words, the tendency to separate “art” (as a universalizing aesthetic aspiration) from “culture” (as a localized expression of a particular people), to treat art as the unique product of individual creation, to prioritize and formally evaluate aesthetic significance, and the perceived clash between aesthetic and utilitarian goals (or art and money), are, together, a fairly specific conception of things. These several commitments participate – as basic cultural underpinnings – in constituting the overlapping art worlds of the US and UK. But these art worlds are not at the same time the world’s.

A brief international comparison makes the point. In the US we often identify graffiti as not art, as anonymous, popular, and criminal. In Mexico City graffiti has been described as a marginal genre, syncretically bridging artisanal with mass production, text and image, and manifesting urban disorder in the battle for control of public space. In pursuit of the “creative city” concept, Barcelona, Spain, has designated specific zones for graffiti artists to legally express themselves, as part of the promotion of a “context of freedom.” While in China, in contrast, graffiti has only recently appeared, as largely non-confrontational, expressing little political content, leaning more “towards fashion” in ways blurring the distinction with advertisements. As art or not art, criminal, insurgent, or fashionable, graffiti is not self-evident internationally, but a doorway into the cultural diversity of geopolitical arrangements of public and private globally.

There promises to be no resolution to the recurring debate between philistines and free spirits over whether to give art over to the “language of business” to secure its financial future, on the one hand, or to strip it of all utilitarian conceits, on the other, in “the exploration of truth and beauty.” This is the case, even as successive “arts in/for the economy” paradigms underwhelm while puritanical defenders of artistic integrity talk largely among themselves.

A cursory survey of corporate and foundation funding for “the arts and culture” reveals modest spending to support arts groups, concert series, shows, exhibitions and performances in the US, that is, artists directly enriching the civic life of communities. But, in international terms, all of this misses the point. The slot allotted to art in US public life is alarmingly narrow in scope and so self-referential as to be problematic, if instead we hope to engage the many cultural worlds of art globally.

With few exceptions, neither side spends much time: seriously working to bridge this agonistic divide, putting art and cultural production back into their different social contexts, considering the several ways art is meaningful for distinct local and global publics, or working to provide more grounded data to better understand art’s many effects. Some of these exceptions can be found here and here. But to understand the multifarious role of art in the international arena, and the ways it participates in such projects as cultural diplomacy, we should jettison the terms of our domestic discussion, since they actively undermine such inquiry.

A first step is to resist the convention to distinguish “art” from “culture,” which has served to cut off domestic arts policy in the US and elsewhere from broader appreciation of the cultural challenges that cross cut international affairs. Especially for applied arts NGOs working with international counterparts, a second step is to recognize and interrogate our own assumptions about the purpose and value of “art.” A third is to re-inscribe “art” back into its encompassing local and transnational settings of social engagement and meaning. A fourth is to take more seriously others’ conceptions of art, as a complex cultural expression.

Finally,we should be much more attentive to the diverse ways in which cultural expression — including artistic expression — is entangled in international affairs at present. The list is getting longer, but most obviously includes culture conceived as: rights, property, digital information content, heritage, security, local and national identity, as well as goods and services. It further includes the ways culture is mobilized and accounted for in: diplomacy, humanitarian response, international development, democratizing movements, and exclusionary politics. “Art” is one mode through which international affairs are culturally configured. Let’s start treating it that way.

Over the past two decades cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, has become an increasingly evident – and fraught – subject of foreign affairs. One reason is a recent proliferation of multilateral conventions by UNESCO, among others, more specifically articulating international frameworks for the protection and conservation of cultural heritage globally. These include the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, the 2005 Diversity Convention, and the 2008 ratification by the U.S. of the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, among other precedents. New collaborations between cultural professionals and the U.S. military, in the context of this increasing attention to heritage, constitute non-traditional opportunities for cultural diplomacy.

One effect of the recent push for international normative frameworks governing the conduct of persons, communities, and states with respect to heritage has been to identifiably constitute “cultural heritage” as a kind of scarce local or national resource, as a well-defined potential subject of state action, and as a basis of international relations and of conflict. Tracking this trend, some historians have referred to the contemporary onset of “heritage crusades,” which can lead to “heritage wars.” In other words, attitudes about cultural heritage have changed over time, and international actors increasingly seek legal redress, or take violent steps, in relation to an increasingly prevailing conception of heritage as: rivalrous, non-renewable, specific in time and place, and exclusively owned by people, communities, or nations.

Not coincidentally, the potential destruction of cultural heritage has become a major preoccupation, not only for particular communities and nation-states, but also for the U.S. military. Recent history is replete with multiple examples of the destruction of heritage sites or objects in active conflict zones, or leading to conflict. A short list would include the 2001 demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, the 2003 looting of the Baghdad Museum, the devastation of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the destruction of Timbuktu’s sacred tombs during the conflict in Mali, and ongoing heritage loss as part of the conflict in Syria, among others. Heritage destruction, looting, and the illegal antiquities trade are one front in these heritage wars. Conflicting claims, the definition of heritage as property, and calls for repatriation, are another front.

Unsurprisingly, then, international organizations, U.S. and other government agencies, have begun to consider more closely the vulnerabilities of heritage in circumstances of conflict alongside the growing importance of “cultural security,” as an emerging feature of international affairs and as a dimension of responsible engagement in conflict zones. For the U.S. military, this has led to a largely unprecedented set of often remarkable collaborations with an array of civilian archaeologists, museum curators, art conservators, and arts and culture organizations, and others, as part of the military’s growing awareness of the ways the mismanagement, neglect, or lack of protection provided heritage resources can actively generate conflict.

The U.S. military’s efforts to protect and conserve cultural heritage in conflict zones is part of a broader cultural turn over the past decade. And it has taken various forms. These include the development of a “No Strike List” for Libya in 2011 to insure heritage sites were not targeted, in collaboration with the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield. They also include military logistical support as part of humanitarian interventions to save endangered heritage in the aftermath of disasters, natural and man-made. They include the innovative use of new tools, such as the coordination of GIS, digital databases, and archives. And they include cultural diplomatic interventions, such as the use of cultural mapping technologies to identify an ancient Afghan irrigation system inadvertently compromised by a U.S. military base. The base was redesigned.

This work also includes the consolidation of new lines of communication and networks of collaboration between military and civilian personnel and applied practitioners in diverse fields of the arts and culture, such as the new CHAMP initiative hosted by the Archaeological Institute of America. These networks cross what have been seldom crossed boundaries between the humanities and the military. On the one hand, they highlight an emerging military footprint in humanitarian “operations other than war,” as a feature of peacekeeping, stability operations, and cultural diplomacy. On the other, collaborations with the military to safeguard heritage illustrate new directions in the applied arts, where working artists and cultural professionals are extending their skills, techniques, and creative visions as a part of the U.S. response to global crises and conflict.

The cultural diplomatic potential of U.S. military cultural heritage management is not without risks. At times the military has been so intent upon developing its cultural capacity that it has not appreciated conceptions of culture other than its own tendency to view culture as an asset and mission resource. It can also be deeply problematic for the safeguarding of heritage to be directly implicated in strategic or tactical military “soft power” objectives. Cultural professionals can be perceived as agents of coercion and control. It is, therefore, critical for them to develop robust parallel humanitarian networks in ways enabling a legitimating autonomy rather than have their work defined primarily through military mission priorities.

This past week the Washington Post ran a story about the troubles of Russian lawmaker Dimitri Gudkov, assailed by his government for having the temerity to visit the U.S. and address U.S.-Russian relations on Capitol Hill. As the short article explained Gudkov was in the U.S. to participate in a forum dedicated to “democracy and human rights,” organized by Freedom House, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and the Institute of Modern Russia, a 501(c)(3) organization incorporated in New Jersey in 2010 “to support democratic values and institutions in the Russian Federation,” and whose president is the son of a Russian oil tycoon jailed by Putin in 2003.

For his trouble, Russian parliamentarians immediately pilloried Gudkov, while accusing him of treason, espionage, betrayal of national interests, ethics violations, calling for U.S. interference in Russia, and potentially damaging state security. If brief, the article paints a picture of surging Russian animosity toward the U.S. amid the curtailment of public freedoms, with Gudkov at the center of a witch-hunt.

Left unreported by the Post was a next level of context for the ire directed toward Gudkov by his fellow Russian lawmakers: Putin’s ongoing “war on civil society,” which he has been ramping up, against foreign NGOs described as “foreign agents” who use “soft power” to “meddle” in Russia’s affairs. From Putin’s perspective, Freedom House has been particularly problematic. It is regularly criticized in Pro-Russian online forums, and Russia has accused it of bias and of promoting U.S. interests in Russia.

The activities abroad of U.S.-style democracy promotion NGOs like Freedom House have, of course, not been a sore point just among members of the Russian Duma. The sharp debate over tensions created by Freedom House activities in post-Mubarak Egypt in late 2011 readily comes to mind. Nor is Putin alone in vilifying international NGOs and depicting them as foreign political operators bent upon undermining national sovereignty or security. Venezuela’s Chávez also regularly did the same, as do others.

I have no wish to extol the authoritarian behavior of a Putin or a Chávez. But too often U.S. responses to hostility regarding democracy promotion abroad tend to ignore that government “by the people” can mean many things in practice, and that authoritarian or populist leadership does not exhaust the reasons for why foreign governments (or publics) do not always eagerly adopt the liberal and secular “transition toolkit” of democracy assistance, as peddled by the Freedom House’s of the world.

As Thomas Carothers has highlighted – and what Freedom House, and in this case the Post, too often ignores – is that in parts of the world where “identity-based divisions” are basic features of the political landscape — like Russia or the U.S. — the problem is often a lack of legitimacy. Voluntary associations with an ethnic or religious component are often assumed to be more legitimate and locally grounded than are their international human rights or democracy-promoting counterparts.

In other words, these are cultural arguments, as Putin indirectly recognizes with his charges about “soft power” manipulations. As an explanation, Russia’s own culture wars, including the relationships among rising Russian nationalism, the Russian Orthodox Church, Soviet-era nostalgia, or Pussy Riot, rarely find their way into journalistic accounts, except as epitomizing Putin’s prickly paranoia amid the Manichean struggle between “freedom” and “authoritarianism” – threadbare Cold War distinction though it might be.

The Post might not understand contemporary Russia that well. But it often also appears thoroughly unconvinced about, or just uninterested in, the salience of cultural agency as a variable in international affairs, except to dismiss it or to make it disappear. And making culture disappear as a geopolitical global factor (except as aesthetic window dressing), has been an ongoing epidemic in U.S. foreign affairs.

Several weeks earlier the Post also published a gotcha-style investigative exposé, framed in the familiar terms of a story about congressional profligacy, which of course is low-hanging fruit in this era of dismal approval ratings and fiscal austerity. In brief, this story documented the frequency of overseas trips by congressional representatives and staff, “arranged by lobbyists” and funded by foreign governments, with what the Post described as a loophole Congress granted itself from oversight of travel restrictions “for trips deemed to be cultural exchanges.”

China is the biggest sponsor of such trips. The Post cited all-expenses-paid trips to China, organized by the U.S.-Asia Foundation, and described staffers staying at “luxury hotels” and indulging in “recreational activities.” It noted “briefings” about Chinese history and culture, and went on to quote the concerns of watchdog groups about “propaganda junkets” that generate a “conflict of interest” for Hill staffers. The article, which could have been written by a pro-Putin Russian legislator, raises ethical concerns, noting the nondisclosure of trip itineraries and the lack of a requirement to itemize time spent on congressional work while traveling.

The exposé appeared intent upon rehearsing the same kinds of objections as raised by the irate Duma members over Gudkov’s trip to the U.S. That article sought to highlight the deterioration of democratic freedoms in Putin’s Russia, while the cultural exchange-as-loophole exposé opted to use the language of conflict of interest and of sympathy-peddling to suggest the need for more oversight over congressmen perhaps not sufficiently dedicated to the peoples’ business. Both articles participate in the same way in a larger universe of skepticism.

Whether intentional or not, the exposé’s point of view is reactionary with regard to the value of cultural exchange. It does not seriously entertain the idea that congressional types would want to improve their foreign policy chops by learning first-hand at no cost to taxpayers about the history, society, and culture of their hosts. But skepticism about cultural exchanges between U.S. and Chinese policy-makers is hard to fathom. Surely, U.S. decision-makers need a regularly updated and first-hand account of China’s ongoing and far-reaching social transformation, as a responsible basis for “dialogue” between Washington and Beijing.

Skepticism about the value of cultural exchange programs is not uncommon, particularly among critics in and out of government looking to trim the budgetary fat. Partly, this is because “cultural exchange” – as a concept— is understood to be vague and can encompass a lot of different activities, while also resisting the technocrat’s need for oversight and metrics. The experience and effects are not best understood as quantifiable and so become illegible in such numbers games.

Distance-learning is no substitute. The study of cultures from afar might produce best sellers, like Ruth Benedict’s 1946 study of Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which influenced a generation of U.S. decision-makers. But understanding U.S.-Japanese relations as a subset of the distinction between “guilt” and “shame” cultures is akin to understanding U.S.-Russian relations as the difference between “freedom”-loving and “authoritarian” politics. Such distinctions are neither descriptively nor analytically helpful, and they entrench geopolitical boundaries of difference that make dialogue harder.

For China, even if – as is most definitely the case – Chinese counterparts view visits by U.S. delegations as soft power opportunities, there is still much to be learned. This includes the extent to which, and the various ways in which China’s command and control apparatus understands foreign affairs as a cultural encounter. But when not phrased as a sweeping dichotomy, cultural explanations have been a hard sell in the U.S. and skeptical journalists are not helping matters.

An earlier version of this post appeared in the USC CPD blog: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/cultural_exchange_and_the_politics_of_suspicion/

Stephanie Stallings recently suggested that creative collaboration is a useful model for cultural diplomacy. She is definitely onto something. Circumstances have changed around the work of diplomacy. Publics are now much less distant, more assertive, and actively engaged participants in the making of their encompassing cultural worlds. To embrace this new reality likely requires rethinking many of the methods of cultural diplomacy and perhaps its basic goals.

In response to this, significant attention is now given to the pursuit of collaborative diplomacy. The call for more collaborative diplomacy tends to emphasize trust-building through cooperation on mutual objectives and around shared values, often via the “team work” of more inter-agency partnerships in projecting the U.S. image abroad. This is a practical call: in a climate of scarce resources, no one can go it alone. Too, typically problems are interconnected and cross-cutting, and so require partners to address. Likewise, the power of social networking – as a social media-driven basis for collaboration – promises to scale-up outreach and engagement.

A turn to collaborative diplomacy echoes collaboration-talk across a range of related activities, from innovation, to science, to the arts. Thomas Friedman recently added his own to the chorus of voices extolling the virtues of Silicon Valley-style creative problem-solving. For Friedman, such problem-solving is epitomized by platforms like GitHub – the largest open-source computer code-sharing host in the world – and by customer-driven non-zero-sum “co-opetition” networks exemplified by the likes of LinkedIn. Thingiverse, an online platform for artists, designers, and engineers, to share digital design files through creative commons licensing, is on the cusp of this trend. Friedman’s message: innovation is unprecedentedly collaborative.

The information economy represents a public model of innovation through community-building, where distinctions between producers and consumers often disappear. And it includes innovation for diplomacy. An emerging biodiplomacy promotes “new forms of technology-based international partnerships” with the promise to “alter the traditional patterns of international cooperation.”

Science is no exception. Knowledge generation is an increasingly borderless activity, and access to necessary expertise, ideas, samples, funding, equipment and machinery now routinely requires international cooperation. Global scientific challenges – from climate change, and biosecurity, to nanotechnology – are trans-boundary problems requiring CERN-type collaborations in the search for global solutions. And the number of transnational research networks continues to rise steeply. Last year set a record of more than 120 published papers in physics with more than 1000 authors.

The National Science Foundation’s new Science Across Virtual Institutions platform, fostering global interaction among STEM researchers, exemplifies this turn. Science is now anything but the solitary visionary toiling alone in his lab. And as has been suggested, a new more multipolar “era of science diplomacy is emerging.”

We might also consider arts diplomacy. But I do not mean the traditional model, held over from the Cold War, of sending, say, the New York Philharmonic to North Korea for a one-off concert. Instead, as I have previously discussed here, we could consider the work of international applied humanities networks. Whether as a dimension of humanitarian response, conflict mitigation, or peace-building, these networks apply arts-based skills in the theater, heritage conservation, and museum curation to facilitate skills transfers and enable expressive opportunities. Rather than singing the praises of one’s own culture, they represent relationships of collaborative storytelling.

These networks at once create new opportunities for public dialogue, and transform conceptions of participation in such ongoing projects as “Europe.” The Europeana project, a cross-border, cross-domain, user-centered service drawing on the collections of over 2000 European libraries, archives, and museums, offers one ambitious example of this sort of frame-building, creating new ways for users to participate in their own cultural heritage even as they are also empowered to generate original content.

Yet not all collaboration meant to be creative is so. It turns out that “brainstorming” – a widely popularized generative technique taken from American business practice – is counterproductive, if creativity is the goal. It generates fewer ideas than the same number of people working alone.

Research suggests this is because brainstorming encourages groupthink at the expense of debate, dissent, and critical engagement with unfamiliar viewpoints. Brainstorming tends to marginalize encounters along the frontiers between disciplines, industries, and kinds of expertise, encounters that promote what urbanist Jane Jacobs identified as “knowledge spillovers”: the non-rivalrous cross-fertilization of ideas among individuals that advance neighboring fields.

By and large policy rationales for public diplomacy emphasize self-representation, defining the message, and identifying a common basis for cooperation (usually articulated as the promotion of “shared values”), as these promote national interests.

But to take creative collaboration seriously as a model means to think more about how particular forms of collaboration engender different creative outcomes and what these outcomes have to tell us about the changing practice of diplomacy. Instead of an initial – sometimes incorrect or superficial – commitment to searching out shared values or interests to the end of building trust and goodwill, the object would be to focus on the often unscripted results of collaboration.

We should start by distinguish mere partnership – fine so far as it goes – from work associated with creative collaboration. The possibilities of collaboration are minimally addressed with the recognition of the practicality or cost-effectiveness of partnership in the face of resource scarcity. If an enabling prerequisite for collaboration, relationship-building is not a sufficient rationale for attentiveness to creative outcomes.

Networked virtual platforms producing user-generated digital content represent one model for creative collaboration, but certainly do not exhaust the possibilities. Over at least the last fifty years, with one foot in the humanities and the other in the social sciences, cultural studies have documented the historical sources of cultural expression. With regular attention to the multiple sources of any given expressive form – say, the Japanese influence upon the spaghetti western – they have consistently described the hybrid results of cultural engagements, often as these occur along fraught social frontiers, in ways relevant to the practice of diplomacy.

Applied cultural studies have much to offer the practice of cultural diplomacy, starting with the fallacy of understanding creative expression as if derived from a unitary cultural source. It we are to take the possibilities of creative collaboration seriously, a cultural-studies-based appreciation for cross-fertilization might helpfully counter a tendency to view cultural exchange as display in the service of representation, where art diplomacy is too often considered a universal and self-evident language.

Instead, we might consider cultural diplomacy as it participates in the blurring of genres, or the work of bricolage, or more recently as part of a culture jam or a mashup. Each offers a different account of the collaborative multi-vocality of cultural expression with which we might animate international relations.

This post first appeared in the USC CPD blog: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/collaborative_creative_diplomacy_partnerships/

Since at least the late 2000s, I have been observing – sometimes organizing, and sometimes participating in – diverse forums featuring different combinations of politicos, policy decision-makers, academics, and applied practitioners, which have broached the relationship between “culture” and “security,” sometimes in overlapping but often in notably different ways. At times, the purpose is to ascertain how new cultural developments might disrupt established security goals. At other moments, it is the other way around, with an emphasis upon ways new security priorities are driving cultural interventions. A previously obscure term – cultural security – is now in much wider use, even if it means different things to different people.

I am not alone. In 2009 the Aspen Institute put together a big-name event also dedicated to “culture and security.” In 2010 the National Intelligence Council hosted a meeting on the topic of “cultural diplomacy and security.” In 2011 the National Humanities Alliance sponsored an event addressing “national security and other global challenges through cultural understanding” at the Capitol Visitor Center. Also in 2011, the Wilson Center hosted a conference to promote interagency conversation on “culture in the military.” Early this year, Georgetown University hosted a Chatham House event on “cultural dialogue in East Asian security.” This past June in D.C., the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy hosted a “global dialogue about cultural diplomacy, national security and global risks.” And so on.

Below the surface of these frequent forums are multiple ongoing initiatives across the securityscape – and periodic efforts to organize them – for enhancing cultural capacity or for identifying key cultural factors of conflict. But beyond the U.S. military’s well-documented cultural turn, something more is percolating here. Less observed are the effects of a preoccupation with security upon the agendas of civilian cultural agencies and other non-traditional participants in security policy and practice.

We could describe this as two simultaneous trends: the securitization of culture and the enculturation of security. The first comprises attention by national security agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere to culture as one potential source of insecurity; in the process re-conceptualizing it in ways consistent with a security-centric worldview. This trend includes groups and countries that perceive the security of their own cultures as under constant existential threat. The second trend includes ways that culture, as a resource, has been applied in many different ways as a part of solutions to diverse problems of security. Often, it seems, security agencies promote the first trend while non-security actors respond by bolstering the second.

One arena in which the term – cultural security – has gained a foothold is in discussions of the strategic importance of preserving artworks, monuments, archaeological sites and artifacts when considering the implications for international affairs of the international art market, the antiquities trade, and the illegal looting or destruction of art and artifacts. This attention includes greater recognition by the U.S. military of the strategic value of capacity-building in heritage training, protection, and preservation, as a force multiplier, incorporated into stability operations, and in collaboration with civilian partners.

Efforts of heritage planning—emergency preparedness and response—also regularly coalesce in terms of the push and pull around “cultural property,” as increasingly defined by international law, as a basis of calls for repatriation, as a politicized resource of community or national identity, and as a source of conflict or its mitigation. If the historian David Lowenthal condemns the proliferation of these “heritage wars,” such developments indicate how cultural identity and related questions are now subject to an ongoing global process of securitization.

Reference to cultural security also points to distinct or diverging national security policies. If the term is not a part of the U.S.’s domestic security lexicon, it figures significantly in China’s. A search in Google Scholar for [cultural security + China] generated over 1,500 hits since the early 2000s, demonstrating a lively scholarly cottage industry in China around its cultural security. China’s approach to cultural security is often embodied in concepts from the Chinese martial arts, or wushu, which is regularly extolled as a resource for “safeguarding national cultural security.”

In 2011, the Central Committee of China’s Communist Party approved a decision to further develop the country’s cultural industry, improve citizens’ confidence in Chinese culture, and enhance its soft power, all understood as parts of the effort to protect China’s national “cultural security.” And earlier this year, President Hu Jintao made the case for China to bolster its cultural security and to “strengthen its cultural production to defend against the West’s assault on the country’s culture and ideology.” China’s Ministry of Culture includes Lady Gaga on a growing list of songs that cannot be legally downloaded because they “endanger national cultural security.” For China, cultural security is a national policy issue in ways it is not in the U.S.

If China’s government understands its national identity through a cultural security framework, one recent trend in international affairs has been to consider the sources of difficulties in multilateral cooperation to be, in significant part, cultural. As the conventional wisdom holds, particular national cultures lead to distinct policy worldviews which, in turn, inform differing assumptions underlying security goals. New joint efforts, therefore, encourage “cultural dialogue in international security” as a way to act internationally while not thinking universally, and to head off a “clash of values” provoked by “contrasting cultural approaches to security.” Other projects seek to be low-profile platforms promoting “strategic listening” and cooperative research on non-traditional threats – including the increased “securitization of identity” – by exploring the multiple ways culture can be “an important dimension of human security.”

Public agencies and non-profits in the U.S. active in “culture and the arts” – traditionally not so concerned with national security policies – now regularly consider what constructive role they too might play in the universe of possibilities presented when culture is brought to bear on problems of security and vice-versa. But it is not clear if there is such a role.

Safeguarding cultural property, cultural diplomacy, and the building of international applied humanities partnerships are three activities we might point to. But future cultural diplomacy efforts addressing the priorities of the security state would do well to consider how those priorities often problematically determine the range and shape of available cultural interventions.

Traditionally, cultural diplomacy aspires to a mixed bag of countering stereotypes, building relationships, improving dialogue, telling stories, creating spaces of commonality, or raising controversial issues, often across fraught geopolitical boundaries. The recent run of “Black Watch” at the Shakespeare Theater Co. in Washington D.C., which follows the fortunes of a Scottish regiment in Iraq, is a good example of theater crossing boundaries to address controversy generated by security decision-making.

Yet ours is a moment characterized by multilateral and political formulations of cultural property, whereby culture is conceived as a rivalrous, exclusive source of identity, existentially threatened, and with sharply defined boundaries to be defended and safeguarded. And “cultural security,” with its associated language of strategic value and threat assessments, appears to promote the manufacture of an increasing “climate of risk” vis-à-vis culture that seeks to solidify boundaries instead of enabling cross-over. In other words, aren’t cultural diplomacy and cultural security largely at odds?

Note: This post originally appeared on the Center for Public Diplomacy blog site: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/risk_assessment_in_encounters_between_culture_and_security/

Amy Zalman recently proposed that “soft power” – as a conceptual frame for understanding global politics – is too narrow and has outlived its usefulness. Her provocation generated fruitful responses and suggests that we might be ready to stop treading water and move beyond our decade-long fixation with the term to new and more constructive places. Zalman rightly points to the costs of the partial privileging of the “soft” (e. g. cultural narratives, symbols, stories) at the expense of the “hard” (e. g. economic or military force), insisting that these two cannot be pried apart, even analytically, without diminishing appreciation for how power in fact works.

Complementing Zalman is Craig Hayden’s additional suggestion that her critique helps to shift attention to the myriad ways soft and hard power are connected and simultaneously expressed through the continued proliferation of diverse kinds of (often non-state) networks. The increasingly variegated facts of Castells’s “network society” make clear that networks mediate the distribution of meaning and value in ways demanding our attention.

Conjoined, these arguments present a compelling picture. They suggest the need to reframe our analysis of global politics in ways transcending distinctions of “soft” and “hard” while better accounting for the many entanglements of the “symbolic” with the “material.” This is particularly congenial to me, trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, since this discussion has been front and center in the discipline for some time. I too have promoted doing so in my own recent writing on cultural diplomacy.

Together, one question these discussions encourage is: How are stories meaningfully distributed across different kinds of networks and to what effect? Instead of inferring cultural consensus when identifying specific groups, for the practice of public diplomacy such questions help us to a more realistic appraisal of the variety of cultural accounts among people otherwise related.

At this juncture we can offer the inverse of Zalman’s argument about soft power: too often, ever more ubiquitous network analyses seem to privilege the “hard” over the “soft” to the detriment of our understanding of how networks work. Certainly in security policy and studies this is the case. We have seen a flood of so-called link analyses, where the game is always to identify connections between nodes in different networks, or who is connected to whom and how. The emphasis is upon the importance of the “hard” social facts of the shape and distribution of connections within and across networks, in order to identify key “information nodes,” “information brokers,” or, in the War on Terror, the “bad guys.”

Ann-Marie Slaughter’s recent call for more attention from U.S. foreign policy decision-makers to the ubiquity of “network centrality” is timely. But, while she notes in passing network “nutrients” – flows of goods, services, expertise, funding, and political support – she is most interested in the density of connections and positioning of networks. Likewise, a recent study in Nature on social influence across networks of Facebook users concluded that more frequent interactions between friend pairs – “strong ties” – have a much greater influence than do “weak ties” on a person’s behavior. Again, it is all about the facts of connection. We can further note how behavior, composed of empirically observable actions, is prioritized over cultural meaning or belief.

More attention has been given to identifying people, their behavior, their connections, and network nodes than has been given to how information is distributed across networks or what these symbols, values or stories mean to network participants.

The New York Times recently ran a story about researchers who used the computational tools of social network analysis to assess the historical or fictional sources of well-known epics like the Iliad. In other words, they were examining the relation between epic narratives and networks. Their analysis privileged connections that were highly assortative – that is, with high frequencies of people associating with people like themselves – as one key “real-life indicator” corroborating an epic’s likely historical origin. Here and most everywhere else “hard” trumps “soft”.

Assortativity is a useful principle in epidemiology because it helps to explain the behavior of diseases as they spread through a population. But we are too prone to use viral metaphors to describe the movements of information, ideas, or beliefs through networks. Despite our fascination with social media technologies, we should not assume that a contagion model best characterizes the relationship of stories to networks. Instead, this might be a case of misplaced concreteness, to use A. N. Whitehead’s useful term.

Significant work has been done on so-called “knowledge-based networks” and their relevance for public diplomacy. One case is Mai’a Cross’s analysis of networks of policy decision-makers working toward security integration in the European Union. She shows how greater internal network cohesion increases network influence. For the EU case, cohesion includes the ways these decision-makers share expertise, common cultural and professional norms, and regular participation in the same meetings.

Assortative thinking encourages demonstrations of how like seeks like, while the effectiveness of knowledge-based networks is understood to turn on shared commonalities, notably, of culture. But exclusive attention to the social facts of connectivity through networks – rather than how people invest network participation with significance – means we assume that the information, knowledge, symbols, or stories that circulate through networks are shared in the same ways and mean the same things. But this is a poor assumption. Social solidarity (or, shared network participation) does not require cultural consensus.

What about when cultural information – like stories – is unevenly distributed through a given network? We are in dire need of a sharper and more grounded appreciation of how compelling ideas, values, or cultural meanings travel through social arrangements of people and how people differently relate to them. This means paying greater attention to variable interpretations of cultural information across networks beyond the shared facts of membership in networks.

Uneven distribution can take the form of stories that mean different things to different people in different locations across a given network. In the 1990s, while conducting research on political change in Bolivia, I interviewed dozens of men about the start of their political careers. Many cited the decisive influence of radicalized high school teachers who encouraged them into joining the Bolivian Communist Party in the 1970s. These men still consorted as members of informal political networks, connected by shared political and economic ties, relationships of kinship, friendship and heritage, as well as long hours spent in each other’s company. But many cited the party’s ideological intransigence – especially its derision of the relevance of cultural identity in largely indigenous Bolivia – to explain their departure from it. While carrying over much of the party’s discourse, they were swayed to other forms of political participation more consistent with their indigenous heritage. While each told the “story of the Left” in Bolivia to me and to one another, they did not interpret it in the same ways.

Resonant stories, particularly political narratives, can mean many things to those perpetuating them. Even “strong ties” in identified networks don’t guarantee cultural consensus. In a climate of policy and research where our attention to networks is increasing, but where this work is focused on the use of computational tools to identify their shape and constituent parts, we might be neglecting the problem of cultural meaning in networks. And so we risk having little insight into the sense network participants make out of their own participation. If we confuse the facts of sharedness with a potentially nonexistent interpretive consensus, we risk missing the import of the story.

While taking part in an energetic three-day convening at Georgetown University dedicated to “Global Performance, Civic Imagination, and Cultural Diplomacy,” it became clear that the meeting was itself evidence for the continued emergence of a global network linking artists, performers, cultural policy makers, human rights activists, social justice advocates, academics, diplomacy practitioners, and others in international affairs, all variously pursuing new intersections of the arts with cultural diplomacy. The conversation sought to further encourage the development of this incipient global network of the “applied arts,” in the process asking what it means when the arts are incorporated into the work of other sectors and put to other ends, like diplomacy.

In addition to the opportunity to witness this effort of network-building, the meeting served as further evidence of increased attention to partnering, collaboration, and reciprocity as the basis for global outreach by often U.S.-based non-profit and other agencies of non-governmental and citizen diplomacy. In a sense, through a variety of diverse endeavors across the applied humanities and arts, we are seeing the spirit of “mutualism” enacted – less emphasis on the pursuit of national self-interest and more pursuit of closer inter-relationships – a concept taken up here and there in the policy discussion about public diplomacy but, at least so far, not robustly pursued in practice. This appears to be changing.

Organizers Derek Goldman and Cynthia Schneider set the tone for this meeting by comparing the efforts currently underway with past U.S. programs like the Jazz Ambassadors during the Cold War. Although that program was highly successful then, times have changed and now it is neither appropriate nor effective simply to take your show on the road, as it were, to demonstrate one’s “culture in a monolithic way.” Nowadays it is necessary to “work more collaboratively” and to ask, “What story do we want to tell together?” Theater is one richly expressive avenue for collaboration. Goldman summarized this trend during the meeting as a “movement away from models of display to imparting agency to others.”

Throughout the meeting “performance” was discussed as a methodology to the ends of: amplifying local voices, enabling people to find ways to tell their stories, creating contexts for public dialogue, enabling social critique, transforming conflicts, or pursuing reconciliation. Art was discussed not as a medium of message delivery so much as “a part of the agenda of others,” where, along with the transfer of skills such as choreography, a collaborative goal is to better appreciate how other people express themselves and what this might mean for how they are currently thinking about themselves, their circumstances, and their worlds.

The Georgetown meeting provided multiple examples of this sort of collaboration, such as Theatre Without Borders, which facilitates global theater exchange among people and institutions. Theatre Without Borders is currently collaborating with the Peacebuilding and the Arts program at Brandeis University to use performance creatively to transform understandings of conflict in chronic conflict zones around the world. Utilizing the tools of community-based performance, this project seeks to nourish and to restore peoples’ expressive capacities as a way to help them better address publicly questions of justice, memory, identity and resistance, but also complicity. This is a collaboration, in other words, that enables dialogue among the participants in, and victims of, chronic violence. But it does not impose an agenda on that conversation.

And this emerging network around socially—engaged applied artists who work globally is just one corner of a larger international environment in which a mixture of cultural producers, workers, and agencies – including non-profits, museums, archives, and libraries – are pursuing parallel applied and humanitarian work with partners. What I will call “applied humanities networks” now comprise a growing diversity of creative collaborations leveraging the knowledge, expertise, and creativity of U.S. cultural professionals, in the service of a variety of international partnerships well beyond the traditional work of arts management.

By and large these activities are not on the radar of decision-makers in international affairs, but they include such efforts as: participatory curation, applications of new social media, archival training, oral history and public memory projects, cultural heritage conservation, digital game design, documentary film, culture mapping, the negotiation of cultural copyright and building of cultural commons, and the management and exhibition of antiquities and other national cultural collections, among other activities. One feature of this work is cultural diplomacy, though not as we conventionally understand it.

A collaboration between U.S.-based folklorists and like professionals concerned with intangible cultural heritage and their Chinese counterparts, the China-US Forum on Cultural Sustainability, is another case of an incipient transnational applied humanities network that has direct implications for cultural diplomacy. On the one hand, the Forum contributes to the internationalization of folklore studies. On the other, it directs comparative attention to the often differing theoretical, policy, and practical frames that inform what is, nevertheless, shared attention to the sustainability of intangible cultural heritage (hereafter, ICH) in both countries. And, the Forum sets out from a shared commitment among scholars and practitioners in both countries to identify, document, present and safeguard ICH, as critical to their “national interest and well-being.”

The Forum facilitates collaborative U.S.-China efforts to chart, compare, analyze, communicate widely, and to generate shared products focused on “tradition-based cultural expressions” through a variety of related initiatives. In the course of their collaboration, ICH practitioners from the U.S. and China have to work through different underlying assumptions and theories that shape and define the scope, meaning and location of ICH in both countries, including different challenges posed for national culture industries, community development, cultural tourism, and for the status of cultural minorities.

One difference is distinct time horizons bounding attention given to ICH among scholars: recent popular culture is given regular attention by U.S. practitioners while Chinese counterparts direct their attention to much older forms of traditional cultural expression. Part of the purpose of the Forum, therefore, is to engage such differences through the encompassing goal of professional development among ICH specialists in both countries.

Notably, the Forum is a model for how to take up what can be potentially explosive bilateral questions (e. g. the status of religious or cultural minorities in China) without also imposing any particular agenda. In fact, collaborators on the U.S. end, like the American Folklore Society and Vanderbilt’s Curb Center, are actively engaging with the Chinese Folklore Society and other counterparts, with the stated goal of establishing a “field of folklore studies with Chinese characteristics.”

A final example is a recently constituted applied humanities network, now working in the humanitarian context of disaster relief, organized around the Haiti Cultural Recovery Project. An effort coordinating many partners and led by the Smithsonian, the project has mobilized applied cultural practitioners from the U.S. and elsewhere to support the efforts of Haitian cultural professionals to rescue, safeguard, and restore the country’s national cultural heritage in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. The rescue of key expressions of Haiti’s heritage has provided continuity to Haitian cultural identity by saving artifacts of collective cultural memory, helping to maintain a cultural basis for Haiti to address its post-disaster national identity going forward.

Incorporated into the overall disaster relief effort, the Cultural Recovery Project is primarily composed of museum professionals – conservators and curators – engaged in the work of stabilizing, documenting and restoring artwork, including: paintings, murals, artifacts, documents, media, architectural features, and historical and archival items. Smithsonian conservators also train their Haitian counterparts in the skills of conservation and restoration, to help build and promote a sustainable Haitian-led center.

The work of rescuing Haiti’s threatened art evolved into an opportunity to relationship-build, to share “common values” around heritage conservation, and also an opportunity for new shared creative cultural expressions. Understood by Haitian counterparts as “arts for survival” that activate the relationship between culture and resilience through the interconnections between art, healing and community, so far these include a documentary film, considerable media coverage, a website, as well as new museum exhibitions focused on the recovery effort.

Notable is the kind of U.S.-Haitian relationship this project represents. A cultural recovery base was set up in Haiti, rather than bringing the artworks to the U.S. for treatment. Capacity-building of Haitian counterparts is one major feature of the project going forward. Cultural conservators from the Smithsonian and other U.S. institutions have taken a supporting role in helping Haiti consolidate its own efforts. All decisions about relative cultural value in the work of identifying, inventorying, and prioritizing individual items of cultural heritage are made by Haitians. The guiding question of the collaboration is “What do Haitians want to do?” A basic goal of the project is to preserve the ability of the Haitian people “to tell their own story to future generations.”

This collaborative work is making the case that effective cultural diplomacy need not aspire to control the message. It is not best deployed when closely linked to the priorities of policy makers or defined national interests. Nor is it always desirable for acts of cultural diplomacy to be framed in terms of the goal of the representation of a people. The development of new applied humanities networks, which feature the efforts of U.S.-based cultural producers and workers, suggests another approach, which we might take note of as a means to rethink conventional wisdom about cultural diplomacy.

The new approach includes: working through collaboration rather than exchange, ceding authority while bringing skills, promoting the agency of others, and pursuing shared creative outcomes, while seeking to address the needs of others in humanitarian terms. This approach avoids trying to convert people into receptive audiences for our own story—however much we happen to like it.